What is a Sales Enablement Platform?

If you are familiar with the sales space, you probably know that one of the biggest buzzwords right now is “sales enablement”. However, do you actually know what sales enablement is? Did you know it is different from sales engagement? Sales enablement platforms are used to help improve seller’s performance. By aligning sales and marketing, allowing for a smoother onboarding, and guiding sellers into best practices, sales enablement platforms are the best way to help boost effectiveness and efficiency.

What is a Sales Enablement Platform?

Put simply, the definition of a sales enablement platform is a tool used to help bring people and technology together throughout the sales cycle. This may mean helping sellers stay organized in their day-to-day, aligning your sales and marketing teams, or even making onboarding smooth and easy. Sales enablement platforms are a great tool for companies looking to increase efficiency and close more deals.

Why you Need a Sales Engagement Platform

It Aligns Your Sales and Marketing Teams

West Coast vs East Coast, Microsoft vs Apple, and Marvel vs DC. All these are some of the biggest rivalries going today, but none compare to sales vs marketing. At least, this is how it seems in most organizations. Whether sales says marketing isn’t finding enough qualified leads or marketing says sales isn’t closing enough deals, they never seem to align. In order to be most effective, this cannot be the case. Sales and marketing need to work together, whether that is sharing data or content, in order to find more leads and close more deals. Sales enablement allows for this process to become much easier and helps provide the right content at the right time to the right people.

It Provides Smooth Onboarding of New Sales Reps

Research for Glassdoor found that “organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent.” This is huge. Without proper onboarding, information may not be shared properly between departments, making the process not as effective as it could be. By having a place where all the onboarding information, such as scripts, sales playbooks, competitor overviews, client reports, and other information made to help SDRs, can live, the time to ramp up a new hire is significantly reduced. This means more time selling and closing deals.

It Informs Best Practices

If you were asked who your best seller is, I’m sure one person comes straight to mind. Think about everything that person does and what makes them stand head and shoulders above your other sellers. Now, imagine if they could teach the rest of your sellers all their tips and tricks. A sales enablement platform can accomplish practically the same thing. These platforms can help streamline and incorporate best practices and techniques to help increase effectiveness and efficiency when used right. By implementing the best parts of each seller across your entire team, just picture how much better the collective whole could be. Sales enablement can help you scale by letting you define an activity or series of activities you want your team members to follow and automatically triggering other activities based on certain outcomes.

What is a Sales Enablement Strategy?

Sales enablement strategy is all about how you use the platform. A sales enablement platform is only as good as you want it to be. If you want to use one to only set meetings, then you can. Or perhaps you only want to use one to share content between sales and marketing. That’s okay too. However, to truly get the most out of it, we suggest coming up with a sales enablement strategy. This is all about how the platform is set up, how you’re going to utilize all parts of it, and how you’re going to use it strategically to your advantage. Make sure you’re not wasting any parts of the platform, since if used right, it’s one of the most powerful tools your business can have.

How Do You Know if You Need a Sales Enablement Platform?

Sales and Marketing Teams are at Odds Even Though They Have the Same Goals

Everyone wants to close deals and increase revenue. They would be lying if they said otherwise. So, why does this seem to be an issue for some companies? According to research by Sirius, nine percent more growth occurs when a business aligns their marketing and sales departments to enable better communication. This is where the lightbulb goes off. The missing part for many is missing a sales enablement platform. A sales enablement platform can get both departments on the same page about content and cadence, resulting in more closed deals.

Sales Reps are Not All Following the Same Process

Sales enablement helps get sellers on the same page. These platforms can help create workflows that are consistent between your reps to ensure they are doing the same process and completing the same tasks. With the same workflow being used by everyone, it is easier to see what is working and what is not.

Sales Scripts are Inconsistent Across the Team

According to Forbes, 70 percent of the most successful US companies provide a consistent sales message throughout the entire buying journey, compared to just 37 percent of all the other companies. Sales enablement allows you to make sure you are delivering a consistent, reliable experience to your prospects and customers.

Conversion Rates are Down, Quotas Aren’t Being Met, and You Don’t Know Why

With the analytics in your sales enablement platform, you can identify areas needing improvement. You can tell which campaigns are most successful, when is the best time to call, which types of customers give you the best results, and more. Check out this post about the most important sales enablement KPIs.

After hearing all this, you may be wondering, “Great, where do I find the best sales enablement platform?” Shortly after this, you will realize there are many of these platforms available and become overwhelmed with them all. However, one that helps combat this stress and works as an easy to use and powerful sales enablement platform is Salesvue. Better yet, Salesvue lives natively within Salesforce, making everything even easier. We will touch on this later in the blog!

Sales Enablement Tools

No sales enablement strategy is complete without a range of sales enablement tools. While it would be amazing if there was one tool that did every perfectly, that’s simply not the case. So, give yourself the best chance to succeed by leveraging the best tools in their respective space. Here’s some of our picks for what you should consider when building out your sales enablement tech stack.

Tools for Content

Marketing isn’t the only group with lots of content and material to keep track of. These two tools help keep your sales enablement materials in order and so much more.

Seismic

Seismic is a sales and marketing enablement software that unites your marketing and sales teams in delivering the most compelling stories throughout your buyers’ journeys. AI-powered content recommendations, instructional design software and content curation tools make sure the right content is being created for the right moment. Plus, with Seismic’s insightful metrics that tell sellers when and how prospects are engaging with their content, you can improve the buyer experience resulting in faster deal cycles, higher win rates, and more efficient and effective content management.

Highspot

Similar to Seismic, Highspot’s sales enablement platform makes it easy for reps to locate content all in a single platform. It sports an intuitive UI, powerful search, and curated browsing experiences. With flexible ways to organize resources and keep them up to date and compliant, your reps always have access to the latest versions. It’s also versatile, supporting more than 80 integrations and over 40 content types so you can bring together decks, videos, and more.

Email Coaching Tools

Emailing effectiveness is a big part of sales enablement, so check out our choice for the tool that will take your efforts to the next level.

Lavender

Get real time AI-driven coaching on your emails or research your prospects. Lavender shows social data, calendar events, personality profiles, and more on your recipient so you can create messaging that engages them. It also tailors and personalizes your email messages using powerful AI that generates personalized intro sentences for you.

Data Providers

Gathering data that truly helps move the needle is essential for sales teams, so check out one that will help give your team the boost they’re looking for.

SalesIntel

SalesIntel is a global provider of high-quality data intelligence solutions, empowering revenue teams to accelerate growth. You can generate target account lists that match your exact ideal customer profile by filtering through millions of technographic, firmographic, and over 9,000 buyer intent data topics. With 95% accurate and human-verified data, sales reps spend less time searching for the correct contact information and more time on their selling tasks. You can also automatically update your prospect records through data enrichment, ensuring that only verified quality records are being reached through selling efforts.

Sales Engagement Platforms

Sales engagement platforms can help your sellers connect with the right people at the right time.

Salesvue

Salesvue is a Salesforce-native sales engagement platform that helps you bring synergy to the whole team. Because you and your data never leave Salesforce, sales and marketing teams have easy access to share and manage all customer and prospect data. With Salesvue, you get real-time insights into how your sales team is performing, what is being discussed in each call, and the effectiveness of your campaigns. Data analysis even shows you objection patterns, so you can manage the marketing message and the sales conversation better.

Sales Enablement in Salesforce

While you may be looking at that list and trying to think about how all these tools work together, there’s a simple solution. The easy answer, Salesforce. Salesforce should be your sales enablement hub, allowing you to use all these tools in a single user experience. Combine the power of tools like SalesIntel, Lavender and Salesvue to add leads to a campaign, craft the perfect messaging and reach your targets effectively all within a single system. 

Conclusion

Sales enablement is an essential part of any organization. It creates alignment, makes things easier and in turn, helps win more business. By assessing the problems you’re trying to solve through sales enablement and finding the right tools to help get you there, your team will be in a much better position. 

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